Long Roads

“Due Date” and “Four Lions.”

Robert Downey, Jr., and Zach Galifianakis in a new movie by Todd Phillips.Credit Illustration by Kirsten Ulve

With whom would you rather be stuck on a long journey, Zach Galifianakis or Robert Downey, Jr.? It’s a close call: the stoner hobbit, hiding in a spinney of beard, or the unreachable Iron Man, twitching and squeaking with nervous intelligence for fear that, if he ever ceased, he might rust up, like his counterpart of tin? Such is the quandary of “Due Date,” the new comedy from Todd Phillips, who made “The Hangover.” Galifianakis plays Ethan Tremblay, travelling to Hollywood with celestial ambitions. “ ‘Two and a Half Men’ is the reason I wanted to become an actor,” he says, although from what cultural height “Due Date” can afford to gaze down on lowly TV shows is hard to gauge. Downey plays Peter Highman, an architect heading home to Los Angeles for the birth of his child. Complete strangers, they collide at the Atlanta airport but wind up making the trip by car. So, we have a pair of incompatibles, getting to know and kind of love each other on the road. It’s not the most high-concept movie of the year, or indeed of any other.

For one thing, defenders of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” directed by John Hughes in 1987, will sense an intruder on their patch, although, if you seek narrative complexity, “Due Date” makes Hughes’s movie look like “Little Dorrit.” Right from the start, when Ethan and Peter get involved in a fracas and thrown off their flight, Phillips doesn’t really bother with ordinary logic, fluffing the loss of Peter’s I.D. (what sort of professional leaves his wallet with his luggage?), as if to stress that what matters here is the bonding of his two leads, and nothing else. But lazy plotting tends to niggle at the back of viewers’ minds, especially if those viewers are replete with memories of “The Hangover,” which was raised from the rut of adult frat-house humor by its neat construction—the way in which Phillips vaulted over the trauma of the stag night, leaving us to wonder, right up to the closing credits, just how Rabelaisian it had been.

Given the new film’s unwavering focus on Downey and Galifianakis, how do they fare? It’s an odd conjunction; buddy movies tend to pitch the goofball against the square, and you could argue that Galifianakis should ideally be bounced off a wall of deadpan—the best of all walls being Charles Grodin, in “Midnight Run.” But Downey, though his surface can be smooth, is turbid with frustration underneath, and there are times when “Due Date” assumes the air of a queasy contest, with each man trying, or straining, to be the less predictable. Not only should we not know what they’re likely to do next; they don’t even know themselves. Hence the scene in which Peter, confronted with a noisome child, thumps him hard in the stomach. (The audience howled with mirth at this, and I could see what was cruel and effective about it, but funny? For a guy about to have a child of his own?) As for Ethan, he waits until the two of them, short of cash, decide to catch some sleep in the car, and then, by way of a nightcap, beats off.

It was never like this in “It Happened One Night.” The addition of gross-out gags to the road movie is hardly surprising—for good measure, we get Ethan’s pet pooch following his master’s example, in the back seat—but it feels depressing, nonetheless. By tradition, the inhabitants of the cross-country genre need only look outward, through the windshield, to see a litany of incidents, whether antic or mollifying, zoom toward them like bugs, whereas “Due Date” suffers from an inward, onanistic slant that seems, in every sense, a waste of space. We know that American road movies, by and large, are quickened by a target or a deadline, while their European cousins—Wim Wenders’s “Alice in the Cities” and “Kings of the Road,” Manuel Poirier’s “Western,” or almost anything by Aki Kaurismäki—take more time to survey the passing land, but, wherever you are, and whatever your hurry, why not meander for a while? “Due Date” will have none of it. America zips by in snippets, as though on the LCD screen of a point-and-shoot camera, arousing not a scrap of curiosity. As a treat, we are given helicopter shots of an open road, and of the Grand Canyon, but in each case, to indicate that we have reached an emotional crossroads, Phillips tips a load of sad, random music over the image—Neil Young’s “Old Man,” then Rod Stewart rasping out “Amazing Grace.” We are not amazed.

“Due Date” is most interesting, and most fearful, when it loiters on the threshold of the homoerotic. It’s a thoroughly man-centric movie, such women as do exist being confined—a drug dealer named Heidi (Juliette Lewis) because she is way too zonked to leave the house, and Peter’s wife, Sarah (Michelle Monaghan), because she is heavily pregnant. Even the dead are male; Ethan goes to the Grand Canyon to scatter the ashes of his father. Then, we get masturbation; we get Peter, high on Ethan’s weed, declaring hazy love to him from the passenger seat; and we get repeated, rearview shots of Ethan, leading his little dog with a purposeful mince, as if auditioning for a role in “La Cage aux Folles.” What’s going on here? In the end, nothing. Downey, especially, is so audacious an actor that I’m sure he would have been happy to pursue the implications of such hints, but Phillips veers away from them, lest he unsettle a portion of his audience. He prefers more familiar risks: jokes about corrupt Mexican officials, jokes about an angry Iraq veteran in a wheelchair (“I’m handicapable”), jokes about vaginas. “Due Date,” in short, takes an adventurous form and recasts it as essentially conservative, making sure that neither we nor the characters grow any wiser or wilder. The hero of “Sullivan’s Travels,” when he got back to L.A., was an altered soul, having come face to face with the cravings of the people; but the Peter who lost his I.D. in Atlanta returns with his identity intact. He has a gunshot wound and a broken arm, but, like Ethan, they are a silly inconvenience, not a menace to his life. For all the difference his odyssey made, he could have been sent in the mail.

Of the many weapons deployed by Western powers against Islamic extremism, comedy has been the most sparingly used. There are two reasons: first, the fear of reprisal from the offended, and, second, a feeling that this particular field of conflict, on which so many have suffered, can never be a subject fit for laughter. The first of these objections is sound enough, as shown by the Danish cartoon controversy. The second is more troubling; you don’t have to be Lenny Bruce to think that nothing should lie beyond the remit of the comic imagination, yet it’s a brave man, or woman, who can plow heedlessly through every claim of decency and taste. Such bravery, or foolhardiness, comes naturally to the British comedian Chris Morris—an actor, writer, TV presenter, and now, with “Four Lions,” a feature-film director. Welcome to the funny world of the suicide bomber.

Omar (Riz Ahmed) works as a security guard in a northern city—the North of England, that is, under heavy skies. His wife is a nurse; they have a cute son, who watches as his dad, in his spare time, sits at a laptop and prepares for martyrdom. Omar, bright-eyed and sharp-featured, may be the sole intelligent being in the film. His comrades in arms—Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), Waj (Kayvan Novak), and Barry (Nigel Lindsay)—are outright cretins, with Barry the most deluded of all; he has converted to Islam and gone straight to its lunatic fringe. Society, in Barry’s eyes, is begging for destruction: “We got women talking back, we got people playing stringed instruments. It’s the end of days,” he says. Haltingly, and despite a disastrous visit to a training camp in Pakistan, they put together a bomb attack on London. And lo, it comes to pass.

The invective energy of “Four Lions” and its Swiftian vision of a confederacy of dunces are never in doubt. The problem is one of form. Morris made his name in radio and television, and his spells as the front man of “The Day Today” (1994), a mock TV-news program, and later of “Brass Eye,” a mock documentary series, were so successful in disembowelling the medium from inside, with all its inflamed visual habits, that some of us have found it hard to take any news channel seriously ever since. With a severity that French theoreticians can only dream of, Morris questioned whether we could still, under any circumstances, hope to acquire a grasp of factual truth amid the writhings of media representation; to that extent, “Four Lions” marks a backward step. There are flickers of faux-documentary, plus ironic glances at Omar, the loather of Western culture, as he cheerily explains his cause in terms of “The Lion King,” and at Waj, during the climax, when he boasts, “I got hostages and everything—like X-Box Counterstrike.” Most of the film, however, tells the story straight, with faith in its own approach. It mocks the dumb relentlessly, and in so doing it allows us to believe, with a dab of smugness, that we know better. Whereas Morris, in his prime, showed that we know nothing at all. ♦